Tigers hit the road for next district matchup

Sealy looks to avenge last year’s home loss to Brazosport

The Tigers will don their away-whites for the first time in district-competition this year.

Cole McNanna/Sealy News

Posted
Thursday, October 4, 2018 12:02 pm

By Cole McNanna sports@sealynews.com

The Brazosport Exporters started the season 0-3 scoring a total of 17 points.

Last week they exploded for a 54-19 win over the North Forest Bulldogs, operating out of a more spread look as opposed to Sealy’s past two opponents’ ground-and-pound, close-knit formations.

However, after watching film from some Brazosport games, Head Coach Shane Mobley said that despite the spread formation, tendencies still trend toward running the ball with both tailbacks as well as the quarterback who can conversely sit in the pocket and launch passes.

On top of that, the special teams and defense of the Exporters came up big with multiple fumble recoveries last week as well as a successful onside kick despite a lopsided score.

Mobley mentioned that the primary message is the same to his defenders in that the lowest pad level is going to win and they still need penetration up front and gang tackling on the outside.

That formula has paid dividends so far for the coach in his second year at Sealy, defeating all five opponents he’s faced so far this year.

The next challenger lies almost two hours away even though they are in the same region as the rest of District 13-4A.

Last year’s meeting of these two teams ended in a shootout with the scoreboard-operator putting up points at a dizzying pace that ended with the visiting Exporters on top 54-48.

To produce another high-flying offensive performance like that, offensive coordinator Chris Carruthers knows that last week’s victory over Fulshear cannot be reproduced.

“That was probably the worst week of offense overall,” Carruthers said. “We got bailed out on a couple big plays by a couple big players but that was pretty bad for us.”

“Pretty bad,” still translated to 386 yards of total offense and 39 points and although Coach Carruthers spoke with a smile at some points in the post-game interview, the words were not so happy.

“We didn’t take a step in the right direction offensively tonight…we survived it obviously, but we’ve got to be better,” he noted. “We’re going to stay after them, we’re going to coach them until we’re blue in the face and make sure that we don’t allow them to make the mistakes and that’s our job and that’s why we get paid,” he finished.

However, he did have a feeling in his back pocket that their work wasn’t about to fall on deaf ears.

“I think it’ll be pretty easy because they know they didn’t have a good week and that it didn’t feel as good as it should have,” he said regarding the offense that went to break with their third 22-0 halftime-lead in only five chances.

But the coach knows that the problems don’t start on the field as they instead start up in the press box where Carruthers is seated, relaying the play-call to coaches on the sideline.

“Ultimately it falls on me being the head of the offense,” he started. “I gotta do a better job and that starts this weekend with the coaching staff taking a look at what we can do to make sure we’re getting better.”

Those efforts will take the field Friday night after a long bus ride but will be put on display with the 7:30 p.m. kickoff allowing these two teams to go at it yet again.